A properly prepared seedbed is essential for good crop yields. There are various types of tillage implements known by crop producers for seedbed preparation. Known tillage implements utilize traditional soil working tools, such as discs, sweeps, or shanks, alone or in combination, in varying arrangements. While each of these different soil working tools performs an intended purpose, known tillage implements do not work properly or effectively when ground conditions have hardened so that penetration of the tools is decreased. For example, the soil condition is greatly hardened during the fall of the year.
Known tillage implements work satisfactorily in the spring. The known implements cut and mix residue, for example corn or bean stalks, with the soil, which allows the soil surface to dry sufficiently to permit earlier planting. However, when the soil conditions harden, the known tillage implements tend to create hair pinning. Hair pinning occurs when residue has been forced into the soil, but has not been cut. Hair pinning creates two problems. First, the residue acts like a wick, which increases soil moisture loss. Second, the uncut residue causes machine plugging in future field operations.
Increasing weight per blade by adding ballast to the tillage implement would be cost prohibitive. Furthermore, maintaining the total machine weight and increasing blade spacing to increase the weight per blade is undesirable because it changes the effective spacing used for spring seedbed preparation. In addition, changing the blade spacing is very labor intensive. Thus, a need still exists for reducing hair pinning created by known tillage implements.